With cyberattacks on medical devices on the rise, the Food and Drug Administration is turning to ethical hackers to help regulators and manufacturers root out vulnerabilities on machines that could put patients' lives at risk.

Medical device makers have pushed back against ethical hackers who have exposed vulnerabilities in their products, and the FDA has typically tried to stay neutral in the debate. But now agency officials say they’re embracing the “white hat” hacking community — and are stepping up efforts to collaborate.

As an example, the FDA points to its recent collaboration with a pair of security researchers who uncovered bugs in devices used to program pacemakers that could allow attackers to remotely change settings on patients’ cardiac implants. The researchers’ findings led the FDA and the manufacturer, Medtronic, to issue rare cybersecurity warnings last week. The company is halting Internet updates on tens of thousands of the devices as it works to patch the vulnerabilities.

The FDA is looking at the research as a model for more partnerships with hackers, said Jeff Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “It’s something that we felt is so important in this space — to be able to proactively cultivate that relationship with the researcher community, because they have an integral role to play,” he told me in a recent interview.

“We’ve also been encouraging industry to take better advantage of the researchers, to engage them,” he said. “It’s great to have folks, if [manufacturers] don’t have their own, who can kick the tires, work on vulnerabilities and work on appropriate solutions.”

The rapid spread of connected medical devices has left the health-care sector more exposed to cyberattacks than ever before — and the FDA’s embrace of ethical hackers shows the agency is willing to use nontraditional approaches to tackle the problem. While government officials and manufacturers alike have long been hesitant to showcase findings from outside researchers, the FDA is joining a growing group of federal agencies that are beginning to incorporate their work into their cybersecurity strategies.

“We’re in a very different place than we were several years ago,” Suzanne Schwartz, CDRH's associate director for science and strategic partnerships, told me. “We do see many many more researchers engaging with us as well as the manufacturing community, and vice versa. So I think that we’re changing the tide as far as that goes.”

The discovery of the flaws in the Medtronic pacemaker programmers is a bright spot for both the FDA and ethical hackers. Security researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts disclosed the potentially life-threatening vulnerabilities in the machines to Medtronic in early January 2017. More than a year later, the company issued security bulletins responding to the researchers' work, but said the vulnerabilities were “controlled,” couldn't be exploited remotely and didn’t pose an imminent threat to patients.

After going back and forth with the company for months, Rios and Butts turned their research over to the FDA, which conducted its own analysis. And in August, at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas, they demonstrated how a hacker could manipulate settings on not just a pacemaker but an insulin pump as well. Schwartz attended the demonstration, which got a shout-out from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb at the time:

#FDA is appreciative of our work and collaboration with the white hat hacker community, and their help in identifying vulnerabilities. Improving MedTech cybersecurity requires this open dialogue. We’re advancing new efforts to achieve cybersecurity goals. #BlackHat2018 @XSAniper

Ultimately, the FDA agreed with the researchers findings, saying in its cybersecurity advisory last week that it had it had “confirmed that these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthorized user” to “change the functionality” of implanted devices. Medtronic, too, said that the bugs “could result in potential harm to a patient” if not mitigated.

The FDA's support was a game-changer, the researchers said. “Instead of taking the manufacturer’s word for it, the FDA ran this to ground truth. And that wasn’t easy,” Rios told me. “They made it pretty clear that what we talked about at Black Hat could happen. I don’t think that we’ve ever seen that before with FDA. They did a good job here, and hopefully manufacturers in the future realize that if a researcher says this is possible they can’t just downplay it.”

The agency is working hard to court manufacturers and hackers — and hopefully ease some of the tension that has existed between the two groups, Shuren and Schwartz told me. In addition to attending the researchers’ demonstration at Black Hat, the FDA sent representatives to the Medical Device Hacking Lab at the Def Con hacking conference, where they worked with manufacturers and hackers to test medical devices against cybersecurity threats.

“I think everyone’s been on a journey,” Shuren said. “Certainly for the industry, for the agency, for researchers, we’re dealing with an emerging area regarding risk.”

The outreach is part of a broader set of efforts at the FDA to safeguard medical devices against digital attacks. This month, the agency unveiled a suite of new initiatives to improve device security, including a playbook to help health-care organizations respond to cyberattacks and plans for new forums to help manufacturers share information about potential vulnerabilities and threats. And just this week, the FDA announced a new partnership on device security with the Department of Homeland Security, which is tasked with protecting the health-care sector at large from cyberattacks.

“The more forward-leaning we are in sharing that information,” Schwartz said, “the better we feel our posture will be across the entire health-care sector.”

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A voter casts a ballot at a polling location in Hermosa Beach, Calif., on June 5. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg)

PINGED: Christopher C. Krebs, undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security's National Protection and Programs Directorate, said Tuesday that "a report on an increased number of cyberattacks on election infrastructure points to a rise in reporting the attempted hacks and not necessarily a spike in the attacks themselves,” according to the Hill's Jacqueline Thomsen.

“Are we seeing an uptick? I don’t know if we are,” Krebs said, as quoted by Thomsen. “I think we’re seeing a consistent and persistent level of activity.” Citing an intelligence assessment by DHS issued last week, NBC News's Pete Williams and Ken Dilanian wrote on Monday that the agency had noticed “an increasing number of attempted cyber attacks on U.S. election databases ahead of next month's midterms.”

Separately on Monday, DHS downplayed a report by the cybersecurity companies Anomali Labs and Intel 471 stating that they found voter records from 19 states for sale on a hacking forum, Defense One's Patrick Tucker reported. “DHS is aware of the report. It is important to note that much of information purportedly being sold is available in most states either publicly or commercially,” a DHS spokesman told Tucker in an email. “It does not appear that this data is indicative of a successful breach of state or local election infrastructure.”

An employee arranges a European Union flag ahead of an E.U. leaders summit in Brussels on Feb. 23. (Dario Pignatelli/Bloomberg)

PATCHED: The United States and the European Union maintain a “strong partnership” in support of a “global, open, stable and secure cyberspace” that promotes values such as the rule of law and human rights, according to a press release released Tuesday by the State Department. The statement was issued following the fifth meeting of the E.U.-U.S. Cyber Dialogue last month in Brussels. “The EU and United States reaffirmed their strong commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms online and condemned undue restrictions on freedom of expression and censorship in violation of international human rights law,” the statement said.

Additionally, American and European authorities both support the development of measures to help “reduce misperceptions and the risk of escalation” in cyberspace, according to the press release. “In order to keep cyberspace stable and secure, the EU and United States are committed to hold States accountable for actions that are contrary to the growing consensus on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace,” the statement said. “The EU and United States affirmed the need to strengthen their cooperation in this regard, through both continued dialogue and practical collaborative efforts.”

Tourists take pictures of the Kremlin, right, as they visit the Red Square in Moscow on Dec. 30, 2016. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

PWNED: Here's a reminder that the United States is not alone in worrying about Russian election interference. “European Union officials are bracing for attempted meddling by Russia-backed operatives and their copycats ahead of the bloc’s elections in the spring, where far-right parties are set to make gains,” Bloomberg News's Natalia Drozdiak reported Tuesday. “That’s led the bloc to bolster its defenses against cyber-attacks and pressure tech platforms to ramp up the fight against misinformation.”

Bloomberg News reported that Europeans are particularly worried about online influence operations. “Officials in Europe are concerned about potential attacks targeting voting technology but especially those designed to try to manipulate voting behavior, for instance by leaking documents, hacking or spreading fake news articles or misleading information,” Drozdiak wrote.

Officials in Europe are also considering stepping up deterrence efforts. “EU governments are set to pledge to further strengthen deterrence and resilience against cyber and other threats at a gathering of leaders in Brussels this week, according to a draft of the conclusions seen by Bloomberg,” Drozdiak reported. “The U.K., the Netherlands and other EU governments have pushed the bloc to expand the scope of its sanctions regime to target individuals and organizations behind cyber-attacks, potentially including activities that seek to interfere in elections.”

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— “A 21-year-old Kentucky man who previously admitted to creating and selling a ‘remote access trojan’ (RAT) known as LuminosityLink has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison,”Ars Technica's Cyrus Farivar reported Tuesday. “Colton Grubbs had previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to unlawfully accessing computers in the furtherance of a criminal act, among other crimes. When Grubbs was first charged, he claimed LuminosityLink was a legitimate tool for system administrators, and he never intended for it to be used maliciously. He reversed course in a plea agreement he signed in July 2017.”

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The New York Times

PRIVATE KEY

The seal of the Securities and Exchange Commission at the SEC headquarters in Washington on June 24, 2011. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

— “Public companies that are easy targets of cyber scams could be in violation of accounting rules that call for firms to safeguard assets, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday,” the Wall Street Journal's Ezequiel Minaya reported. “The SEC said in an investigative report that nine public companies wired nearly $100 million to hackers who impersonated corporate executives or vendors using emails. One company made 14 wire payments to a hacker, resulting in more than $45 million in losses, the SEC said. The agency declined to punish the companies, which weren’t identified.”

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The Wall Street Journal

SECURITY FAILS

The Apple logo on an Apple store in Brussels on Feb. 8. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

— “Apple apologized over the hacking of some Chinese accounts in phishing scams, almost a week after it emerged that stolen Apple IDs had been used to swipe customer funds,”the Wall Street Journal's Yoko Kubota reported. “In its English statement Tuesday, Apple said it found ‘a small number of our users’ accounts’ had been accessed through phishing scams. ‘We are deeply apologetic about the inconvenience caused to our customers by these phishing scams,’ Apple said in its Chinese statement. The incident came to light last week when Chinese mobile-payment giants Alipay and WeChat Pay said some customers had lost money.”

A spokesperson for the Irish Data Protection Commission told CNBC on Tuesday that the Facebook security breach in September, in which hackers accessed information from user accounts, affected 3 million European citizens.

CNBC

THE NEW WILD WEST

A NATO flag flies at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels on March 2, 2014. (Yves Herman/Reuters)

— “A new NATO military command center to deter computer hackers should be fully staffed in 2023 and able to mount its own cyber attacks but the alliance is still grappling with ground rules for doing so, a senior general said on Tuesday,” Reuters's Robin Emmott reported. “While NATO does not have its own cyber weapons, the U.S.-led alliance established an operations center on Aug. 31 at its military hub in Belgium. The United States, Britain, Estonia and other allies have since offered their cyber capabilities.”

Hackers have infected three energy and transport companies in Ukraine and Poland with sophisticated new malware and may be planning destructive cyber attacks, a software security firm said on Wednesday.